


the song of our empire

by strzyga



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, dream imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-12
Updated: 2010-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:09:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strzyga/pseuds/strzyga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for the kink meme prompt, <i>slow dancing in a burning room</i>. Arthur dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the song of our empire

Arthur dreams,

 

and wakes, and the ground is hard and dry beneath his fingers. He uncurls from where he had been balled up like a millipede, dust clinging to the fabric of his suit. He brushes it from his shoulders.

Above him the sky is the color of the dried grass that crunches before his feet. There is no sun, just a hole in the sky. Light bleeds through around the edges, like the corona of an eclipse. If he looks closely enough he can see solar prominences, strips of burning color along the rim, light bending around the non-sun, warped through its gravity in filaments of silver that are just barely visible to his eyes.

He does not find this odd.

When he looks around, the field in which he stands seems to extend forever in all directions.

He picks a direction at random, and walks, and walks, and

 

time passes, and does not.

Beneath his feet shatter ridged scoriae of burnt grass, crackling like cellophane in his ears. As he walks the landscape never changes.

He walks for a second, a millennium, a hundred years.

He pauses, and looks around. He says, I hear you, but I am not afraid of you, and he sees it, from the corners of his eyes, the thing that is hiding in the hole in the sky.

It roils, twists. Curls around itself like a serpent, eating its own tail.

No, he says.

And the wasteland flowers, scorched grass bursting into a field of poppies like blood splotches, blinding crimson against lush green.

Then the ground opens up, earth crumbling below him with a roar,

 

and Arthur looks to the right, his feet to the sky. It is blue, clouds a triptych beneath his feet, so close he could reach out and touch. There is a hole in the sky, and around its edges coils something he cannot look at, that can only be seen from the corners of his eyes. He is ~~afraid~~ flying. He is

 

standing in an empty street, buildings around him that dance and crack the sky. Light bends around a black hole, huge above him, glitters like knives from a million sheets of glass.

He walks, alone, down vacant streets, and all the while the thing hides up there, twists like it wants to shed its skin.

Someone says, in a voice that is at once familiar and wholly new, in a thousand different languages, Paint them all red.

And there is a river of blood rushing down the road, clinging viscid to his skin as it breaks against him, throws him backwards into a Rorschach splatter against twisted concrete and metal,

 

echoes music back to him, plangent horns and a rich, husky contralto. He is dancing, suit gleaming pale in the smoky light of the club, floor checkerboard linoleum. The girl is pretty, at once both slim and full, curvaceous in his arms. She smiles, and her mouth is red, so red, and then the girlskin sloughs away and Eames is huge against him, mouth scarlet still and eyes burning like stars.

He says, I see the sun, and the walls flicker, translucent, and he can see the thing hiding in the hole in the sky, hiding behind Eames' mouth when he smiles. The skin of its mouth peels back like cunt lips, pink and wet and porn star loose.

They waltz, he and Eames, as the room blossoms into flames.

The serpent has let go its tail.

They waltz, and the world burns around them.

 

Arthur wakes.

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/9742.html?thread=19845902#t19845902) at the [inception kink meme](http://inception_kink.livejournal.com/): _slow dancing in a burning room_. kudos to anyone who catches the various song references included therein. title stolen from a song by Rishloo ("to tame the temporal shrew").


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